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It is worthless only to those who cannot find worth in it. You heard Wayne's example...

Besides: it's all in fun! Yes, kids can get into it too much, but that can happen with everything. A lot of sugar is bad for you...is sugar worthless? No, because plenty of people eat it now and then and enjoy it. We all have hobbies and ways of relaxing outside of work (even workaholics do)...it's over-use thats bad, in my opinion.

Chris Roane: I read every word of what wluke had to mention, and I do agree that Pokemon can be helpful in circumstances. Still, it has ruined my brother (almost 13). Before he got into Pokemon, he was a pretty good student, but that quickly changed.

Believe me, webmastering has made my grades a lot lower then what they would be if I didn't do it so much. However, I think webmastering will help me more in the long run anyway, a lot more then most of the classes I am taking now. But I do admit, I definately need to get a good education and I won't let my grades go below an 85% or so.

It's hurt my math for sure - I despise math anyway, but this has given me something to do INSTEAD of math. Hopefully I'll get back on track, but I do agree that skills like these have to be more valuable than some of the school work you or I might be doing.

Everyone seems to forget that everything related to Pokemon has one common goal. That goal is to sell video games.

The cartoons, toys, cards, and even movies are all secondary to the games. Nintendo was going bankrupt, their N64 platform was not even close to be as successful as they needed it to be. Two things have saved the company thus far and brought in the billions of dollars worth of revenue they needed. Yes, you heard it right, Pokemon is a multi-billion dollar industry now.

One is a little hand-held game machine called the Game Boy. It has all the power and abilities as the original Nintendo did. In Fact the Pokemon game looks so much like the original Legend of Zelda it isn't even funny. The second is Pokemon. Right now there are 5 pokemon games for the GameBoy. You need access to at least 2 different versions to win the game. At Christmas they will release 2 more. The biggest feature in the Gold and Silver versions is that there is time and the world gets darker after night. Only from these simple cartridges and the marketing blitz put out by Nintendo did these little pocket monsters become popular.

All in all they are no more hazardous to our society than Batman, Spiderman, Superman. The only difference today is that instead of comic books you have video games and trading cards.